Saturday, October 02, 2010

Gay black men 86x as likely to be HIV+ as rest of non-gay male population

The CDC released a report this week quantifying what had previously been widely known to be true, but only in a general sense--that AIDS is a gay problem. Pat Buchanan put it bluntly when he wrote that gays "declared war on nature, and now nature is extracting an awful retribution".

It's also a black problem. And an intravenous drug use problem. What it definitely is not is a straight, sober white guy's problem. I confess to being ignorant on the controversies surrounding the issue but the relative infection rates alone are more than enough to keep me from experiencing any surprise in recalling the outsized media attention the "AIDS epidemic" has received over the last couple of decades.

The CDC reports that today homosexual men are 44 times more likely than the rest of the population to be diagnosed as HIV-positive. Much of the rest of the data, however, are presented in absolute numbers of cases, which is hardly ideal for comparative purposes. Using the GSS to get at the percentages of white, black, and "other" (which includes about half of Hispanics) men who are homosexual and women who are heterosexual as well as US Census data for population figures and sex ratios by race, I created an HIV+ index in which values are derived by taking each group's representation among newly diagnosed HIV infections and dividing it by that group's representation among the US population at large. Thus, a value of 1 indicates HIV infection rates at exactly what would be expected if the virus afflicted all groups with equal frequency. A value greater (less) than 1 indicates higher (lower) HIV infection rates than would be expected based on population alone:

Group

HIV+

Gay black men

42.40

Gay Hispanic men

19.69

Gay white men

12.77

Straight black women

2.14

The rest

0.49

Straight Hispanic women

0.49

Straight white women

0.14

The CDC only included data on groups that constituted at least 2% of the total number of new infections. Consequently, there is nothing on heterosexual men of anyrace. AIDS is full of hate, that's for sure! Because of the difficulty in accurately gauging needle usage by group, it's not shown in the table (but still included in the total number of new HIV infections).

As mentioned above, the CDC reports the much higher prevalence of HIV infections among gay men than among the rest of the population. Using the additional sources noted above, we are able to take that a step further and show how much more likely gay men of each race are to be infected by HIV relative to the non-gay male population:

Gay group

Rate

Black men

86x

Hispanic men

40x

White men

26x

If the comparison were strictly between sober gay and straight men, the gay multiples would be considerably higher than they are here. Women and drug users are more likely to be infected with HIV than straight men are, but the rest of the population necessarily amalgamates them into one big non-gay guy group because the CDC withheld data on heterosexual male HIV infections.

Hey, Obamacare has us paying for drug rehab for junkies of all sorts as well as for those who wish to engage in risky sexual practices. Great guy, that Obama. Great gal, that Nancy P. Great guy, that Harry Reid. Oh, I just can't forget Barney--great guy, that Barney Fwank.

HIV is on the rise because the younger generation of gay men knows that there are pills that will keep them alive for decades should they contract the virus. They weren't around to witness the carnage of the 80s and 90s.

And...they believe they are young enough to see an ultimate cure.

What they don't realize is that two things will always make them victims of a lethal bug, even if that bug is not HIV. 1) The anus not biologically designed to protect against bug invaders--the cell lining is very, very thin and not at all similar to the mucousal lining of a vagina 2) The easier time a bug has of getting from one host to another, the more it can afford to be virulent. If you are a bug, why bother to evolve to a more benign state so that your host doesn't die (and you with it) if you can easily be introduced to a new host. Promiscuity provides that easy introduction to new hosts.

HIV will one day be conquered. But, there will always be more killers. Only modification of behavior changes anything. I fear gays are in for a vicious cycle of fear of dying and the attendant modification of behavior, followed by medical breakthoughs, followed by a return to risky behavior, followed by new infections and death and on and on.

AE - I blogged about this recently, but my shock is with the gay community's lack of urgency compared to what they displayed 20 years ago. The gay male community is a small, tight knit community, and one would think horrors from 25 years ago would still be vibrant memories today. The medication advances have an impact, and they make the movie "Philadelphia" or "Boys on the Side" extremely dated with characters that die from HIV/AIDS.

Regarding the stratospheric gay black male infection rates, I recall the NY Times a while ago explaining the black female HIV infection rate to the 'down low' issue. The cultural issues with black male homosexuality need to be dealt with first by that community before they think those infection numbers are dropping.

Libtards will probably say there needs to be more education about HIV/AIDS. Schools and the media frightened kids in the late 80s and 90s enough that one would think the education would have made a difference. They grew up to be these infected adults. It did not not for lack of education, but for disregard of risk.

I knew that AIDS was almost exclusively a gay problem in the United States but I did not realize the extent to which it affected blacks more than others. I guess this parallels the patterns for other STD's.

I while back I was doing some research to try to find out the reason healthcare costs were higher in the U.S. compared to the rest of the modernized world (well, more specific reasons than "we're not Canada"). I read this McKinsey and Company report and the table on .pdf page 86 really gave me pause. It has National Institute of Health Spending by disease per person afflicted and HIV/AIDS comes out to $6,105 compared to $48 for diabetes and $29 for cardiovascular disease. In fairness, you could probably get more bang for your buck in AIDS research in terms of progress towards curing the disease but it sort of undercuts the narrative of gays as oppressed victims of society.

Gays get HIV, and other STDs, at far higher rates because 1) they do anal sex and 2) they are extremely promiscuous (sometimes up to hundreds of partners in a single year). Before HIV, gays were well-known for their high infection rates of other STDs.

Now that gays can be out we will continue to see increased diseases among them.

I simply don't want to have to pay for their choices any more than I want to pay for the costs of STD treatments for straight promiscuity--like Herpes.

Anyway, down the road will come the discovery of what biological forces causes one to be homosexual. I will bet at that point they will figure out a way for parents to prevent it from occurring.

Those who are gay can stay gay and enjoy their lives being who they are. Parents can choose for themselves whether they have administered the "cure" for whatever causese the side effect of gayness (probably a vaccine) and little by little the pop. of gays will decrease. Inevitable.

That sounds reasonable to me. So Pat Buchanan was right, if a little crass.

Tanabear,

Well, AIDS is a right-wing virus, so those on the right are complicit in its spread if they don't fall to their knees in lament while beating their breasts(never mind that they tend to advocate lifestyle changes that would virtually eliminate it). Your mock shock leads me to suspect you're an AIDS sympathizer!

Anonymous at 5:23 on 10/5 said: "Well... given the fact that the WHO estimates that 75% of all HIV infected people worldwide are heterosexual, who really has declared war on nature?"

Does not compute.

Even if your statistic is correct, assuming 5% of the population is homosexual and 95% is heterosexual, that still means that homosexuals are about 6 times as likely to get it as heterosexuals.

For example:

Assume we have a population of 100,000 of whom 95,000 are heterosexual and 5,000 are homosexual.

This same population has 1,000 people who are HIV positive. Going by your statistic from WHO, 750 of those are hetero and 250 are homo.

Thus, homosexuals have a 250/5,000 (or 1 in 20) chance of getting HIV while heterosexuals have a 750/95,000 (or about 1 in 126) chance of getting it. In other words, homosexuals are still about 6 times more vulnerable.

The real statistics are probably even more drastic when you narrow it down to homosexual men, since lesbians are probably much less likely to get it.

That is the crux of why the Establishment is so hostile to any deviation from the accepted AIDS narrative that is now firmly entrenched. The method for ending the epidemic is known--execution is the problem, and the execution fails because of gays' sexual behaviors.

I recall reading that "the delta-32 allele for the CCR5 gene, which more or less makes it impossible to get full-blown AIDS" also protects against bubonic plague, explaining its relative prevalence among Europeans pretty well.